


Notlanguage

by bible



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 13:32:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3448976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You should have seen the way he was looking at you, like you were the sea, and he wanted to drown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notlanguage

Their eyes discussed, notwords in the notlanguage: an unending exchange, the snarls and the smiles and the laughter tinkling in the syrupy Pacific sky not enough. It was the eyes; it was always the eyes. Snafu’s eyes were mad, wild, flickering consistently, and ringed like a fearful nocturnal creature, some ghostly monster of the island.

Sledge’s were light. Then darker, then darker, then darker. Snafu had tugged on the back of his ginger hair one day, turning it in his fingers, running clipped nails over his moist scalp. “Your hair’s gettin’ browner,” said Snafu, with disappointment and the childish, stupid tone of a man stripped of civilization and humanity long ago.

Sledge tapped his fingers wildly on the rifle on his lap, and tugged his head away.

A Louisianan accent explained a Louisianan suspicion, with the story-telling tone of the old, wrinkled black women behind the counter of the magic store in Mobile: “‘Cause of the sin.” Snafu said it assuredly, then leaned back into his foxhole, heels digging into the muddy ground, raising indentations. Sledge rolled his head on his neck to look at him, eyes slit, one glance-over. An American plane shuddered above—a Marine Corsair—and glided lazily through the burning bright sky. Everyone looked up, save for Snafu and Sledge, their line of vision leveled on each other’s. 

That was the first look that spoke.  _What do you mean?_

"Your hair’s gettin’ dark as your eyes. ‘Cause of the sin. All the murders, all the bullshit."

Sledge blinked twice, then rose his eyebrows. Overhead, another B-24 passed, the fat body rattling in the depth of the blue sky, tossing a shadow over Sledge’s glittering eyes. Yellow dust motes spun in the slant of light that followed as the bomber shat out one more weapon, shaking the island.

They rose to their feet: that was their cue.

The look had said,  _You’re mad._

And Snafu’s said,  _Maybe, maybe_.

* * *

One night, Snafu hissed Sledge his history with a poison tongue, and he looked at Sledge like Sledge hated him.

Snafu told him about his childhood:

It had been a party, a birthday of someone who was related to someone in his family.

He had pushed his black hair out of his eyes and looked at one of his wide-mouthed cousins in a white dress with eyelet sleeves looking back at him, scratching her nose and staring at him like he was some elephant in a zoo—something dumb and ugly and impervious to hurt.

 _What do they tell her about us?_ Snafu thought.  _That we’re not really family, just her crazy uncle’s wife’s nasty kids?_

 _You’re no relative of mine, you’re not my people_ , he whispered to himself.

New and terrible words rolled around in his head while the air turned cool on his neck. Snafu got up, shook out his shirt, and strolled off for a walk through the rosebushes.

He put his hand out and trailed them lightly against the thorny stalks and plush blossoms, scooping buds off as he passed. He pulled the buds apart, tearing the petals and dropping them down inside his shirt. He even pulled the waist band of his pants loose and tucked them into his briefs, walking more slowly then to feel the damp silky flowers moving against his skin.

 _Trash steals_ , Snafu thought, echoing his aunt’s cold accent, her husband’s bitter words.

"Trash for sure," Snafu muttered in Sledge’s ear back in real time.

But he only took the roses.

No hunger would make him take anything else of theirs. He could feel a kind of heat behind his eyes that lit up everything he glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that he couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than him.

He stood in the garden and walked around and around, pouring out heat and rage and the sweet stink of broken flowers.

Sledge looked at his hands, the sea-salt sores, the browning skin draped over more-prominent bones, the dirt caking his fingers and staining his cuticles black. In his palm was a glimmering tooth, the gold barely recognizable, it was so obscured by blood. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said.

"No, no, it doesn’t."

They faced each other. They both knew Sledge had what Snafu couldn’t. But it didn’t matter now. They were on the same island. They both knew what man they’d become.

And that man was very dangerous.

* * *

The two dangerous men spoke in the notlanguage of the notpeople once again.

Three weeks, three days, and three nights since the last firefight, on Pavuvu after Hell (they called it Peleliu), Snafu and Sledge rested their helmets against each other, Snafu laughing so loud and smooth that the noise seemed to be a liquid. Sledge almost wept, and they didn’t speak, just stared for a long time, vision locked, sharing.

Snafu’s eyes told vicious stories, and Sledge intercepted every so often.

They could almost hear it.

_And while they produced the child — (viciously) — viciously produced the child, in jagged, rough humps and shuddering breaths — (and he said terrible things) — oh, yes, terrible terrible terrible things, called her nasty things, everything in the book — (called her bastard, called her whore) — called her slut, called her bastard, and then they’d been done, and she’d been ready to bear another child — (in that wild band of children, those useless children, those immodest children) — those awful children, they’re not like us — (we’re good) — because us? We’re good. (Dirty Japs.) Dirty fuckin’ Nips._

Out of the quiet thunderclap, as peaceful and decorous as such a shattered island could get, Snafu had laughed madly, had whooped and grinned, had burst out with snorts. Sledge pressed his palms to his temples and shook his head, had chuckled lightly, his bird-cage chest rattling with a small sound.

"The fuck’re y’all two doin’?" Leyden wondered, passing the mouth of the tent.

"Staring contest."

"He gotta get so close? Swear to god, Snafu, we can see your eyes from the moon."

* * *

Everything became a sweat-marred bone orchard under the ruinous weeks. Sweat stuck skin to cloth, creating burning-hot, blistering sores that peppered the soldiers’ backs, arms. Red welts blossomed along their necks, and dysentery yellowed skin. Colorful bruises dotted lanky limbs when the canvas-like threads they wore rode up. Mosquitoes nibbled viciously at their necks. Mud sucked on their legs like cement, swallowing and clinging to their bodies in miserably wet dollops.

Okinawa, what we wouldn’t give. What he wouldn’t give. What they wouldn’t give.

Well, they wouldn’t give up.

Snafu spent most of his days prattling. It was a good way to stay sane in the night, talking. Imagining ideal situations, as if they’d ever coagulate to civilian life as if never removed. Sledge thought that maybe Snafu never fit. That he belonged leaping over bodies and tossing his head back to narrow his eyes at the bombers overhead; he belonged ducking over bodies, shielding open necks, forgetting names, shrugging off death.

He could see it, too. Sledge could imagine Snafu uncomfortable in childhood: not a leader, but a soldier. His teen years, walking uniform and holding his head high. Paranoia shaking every bone in his body, skepticism ringing his face.  _I don’t like the name Merriell_ , he would say. But he wouldn’t say it to anyone. He’d be alone. He’d be around a spring, where his family got drinking water, where silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Snafu would watch the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream, and he would want a battle field, dust and hardness, cold wind whipping at his face, shopping centers erected for clothes and used for hiding points. He’d look through the speckling of trees, and he’d want to see the crosshairs of a rifle.

He wondered if Snafu saw something else in him than what he was. If he saw depth, if he saw a shiny past, a clean one; rose-water and honey.

Snafu was mad, he was insane, he smoked filter-less cigarettes and ripped his nails off sometimes, and he snarled at newcomers. But he wasn’t stupid. And Sledge saw the way he looked at him. Snafu saw something, but Sledge didn’t know what.

Until the second day of the first month stationed in the hellish island, in the daytime, when things were quieter, when it was too bright to operate under the risk of getting shot, and Burgie slept nearby, his hand curled beneath his sharp cheekbone, looking peaceful.  _Hardened Texan_ , thought Sledge. Snafu shuffled down into their hole, leaned back against the slope that he’d dug, looked directly at Sledge and brushed his calloused pointer finger beneath his chin.

"You lookin’ nasty, fella."

Sledge dignified this statement with a ‘hmm,’ his eyes heavy.

"Take a quick nap."

"What about Burgie?"

"I got two eyes."

Sledge rose an eyebrow, then sunk lower in his spot, crossing his arms, nestling their shared Tommy, chin against his chest. He gave one upturn of his vision over the curve of his helmet, then a half-smile of thanks. Snafu’s big eyes fell on him, and Sledge’s fell closed.

In a Talismanic state of half-dreaming, where the world around him was fuzzy and carried the quality of things thought of in a fever, he heard Snafu’s voice slide in a sleepy Cajun drawl, liquor and syrup. “Oh, Sledgehamma, he’s from ‘bama. Bet he grew up in a daisy field and shit roses, played flute for the forest animals, then picked up a gun that some mad traveler like me dropped in a his patch of grass one night and  _blam-blam-blam!_ went the birds, and wasn’t  _that_ more satisfying than that incessant tweeting! Decided he liked killin’, decided he was good at it.”

"No one likes killin’, damn it."

"Sure, but some of us are good at it."

It sounded like he was listening at a distance, like slivers of ice passed over water he was under, fading and rising, waves crashing. Or the police radio eddies of crime coming in and stopping he heard on the radio back in Mobile.

He blinked, but let his eyes slide close again, worn and stinging, heat rising to the front of them when he realized his head was cradled by Snafu’s arm, the warm crevice providing a pillow. Better than his helmet.

He woke to a warm breeze on his face, a barked order, and Snafu’s arm slipping from behind his head. “Sledgehamma,” he said, “Up and at ‘em.”

He craned his neck back, looked up at Snafu. He had spoken of him, some silly, ridiculous product of his odd head, but Sledge knew there was depth to that theory. He met his eyes, blinked a slow, worn blink, and saw Snafu’s mind spread out on his face.

_You’re not quite perfect, Sledgehammer. Not one bit._

* * *

Sledge’s account was important. Important to him in the way transcribing a holy text was important to a monk in a monastery. There was always the underlying paranoia that once he died, the New Testament would be flung, his chicken scrawl writing someway-somehow ending in the paws of a Jap, all of it going to shit because of observations recorded.

Of course, it was a silly suspicion, but he couldn’t help himself, squatting beside Snafu while they scoped past a tree line that shuddered in a scorching wind that picked up wet moisture. “Snaf,” he mumbled, garnering a grunt from Snafu of recognition, a ‘go on.’ “You keep my book close if I die.”

It was abrupt. A very ugly statement, but in Sledge’s mind, it’d been a simpler kind of fear. Just a security measure.  _If I die_. Death was so easy here. It was so simple, common. Life was cheap.  _If I die_ was just an assumption.

He hadn’t expected Snafu to turn his face from the rifle scope like a newbie idiot, and stare at him, jaw ajar, with a hitch between his brows. Sledge licked his lips quickly, a slide over the cracked, split skin. Snafu’s face tightened and sharpened into planes, and he looked to his weapon angrily once more.

Snafu did not need to dignify him with words.  _You’re more important than a damn book._

* * *

In the spring, a white blossom tree sprung over the rural field of Angie, Louisiana: population two-hundred-something. Sledge and Snafu stretched under it, the only two beings in that small town that mattered, the only two Marines. Four years after Fat Boy swallowed a city and bled in fiery rolls into the inky sky, the shivering tree in the United States seemed ethereal, seemed untouchable. Something out of a dream, like it produced sweet raindrops and its petals tasted like candy.

Initially, Sledge felt oddly ashamed in its presence. Grimy, humbled. He had found Snafu upright against the bark, his legs flattening a yawning field of green grass, his hands folded in his lap in odd reverence.

As he sank down beside him, Snafu had lifted his arm, offered a false pretense of opening his side for comfort, to which Sledge began to lean towards, and was met with a hard slap on the back of his head.

"You fuck, you invading motherfucker."

A bitter, painful argument ensued on the shivering grass, soil scraping Sledge’s pressed clothing: not so dry as the coral on Peleliu, or as wet and excrement-strewn as the islands of Okinawa. They wrestled through the dirt, throwing accusations in smeary southern accents, and Sledge could tell by the aromatic acidity of his breath that he’d been drinking—much like himself. Sledge had never been heavy of a drinker before—or even during—the war. He’d always compared the slick burn to gasoline, had coughed, his chest tingling, and promptly traded his gin or whiskey for tins of peaches or oranges. But the numb buzz that rattled his skull was more prominent (even if only an increment) than the vivid jungle leaves shivering beneath a spray of blood, or a hot gust of wind picking up bone and coral dust and slipping it past Sledge’s open lips.

Alcohol smelt so distinct now. Perhaps it wasn’t an aroma now, but more of an instinct. Like pheromones.

So maybe that was why Sledge decided to stifle the scent by plugging his mouth with his own, sliding their chapped, dried lips together, still cracked and pale a year after the war was over.

Sledge’s skin hadn’t felt so feverish since Peleliu, or since his heart murmurs had spiked his temperature, his anemic skin going pink. Snafu’s palms centered on his thin wrists, wrapped around them until the bones creaked, and he lifted him. Sledge lost balance and propped his knees into the ground, settling his waist onto Snafu’s stomach. Snafu sat up as he moved, so Sledge was planted in his lap. Their breath came in rough breaths, and they settled their vision.  _Oh, we need this._

 _We’ve_ needed  _this._

The next kiss was like a dream.

The kiss after was like a war.

And when they’d rolled over, fixed their clothing, looked at the petals of the tree dropping slowly through the sky over Louisiana, not Okinawa, not Pavuvu, it finally felt a little like peacetime.


End file.
